Sex Differences in Temporal but Not Spatial Attentional Capture

The accuracy of detecting or identifying a target decreases when a salient distractor is presented. This decrease is explained by the temporal or spatial diversion of attention to the distractor and thus is referred to as attentional capture. Using temporal and spatial visual search tasks, we examined whether there are sex differences in attentional capture. In Experiment 1A, a temporal visual search task measured attentional capture in the temporal domain by asking participants (97 men and 92 women) to identify a target embedded in a rapid stream of nontarget letters while ignoring a preceding peripheral distractor. In Experiment 2, a spatial visual search task measured attentional capture in the spatial domain by asking participants (146 men and 83 women) to detect a target among spatially distributed nontarget items while ignoring a distractor presented simultaneously. Our results indicate that attentional capture occurred in both tasks. In Experiment 1A, the magnitude of capture was significantly larger for women than men. In Experiment 1B, we confirmed sex differences in temporal attentional capture by recruiting a new set of participants (141 men and 85 women). In Experiment 2, the magnitude of capture was comparable between the sexes. These results suggest that women are more sensitive to bottom-up signals than men when they engage in a temporal search task and could be explained in terms of sex differences in the ability of adjusting the size of attentional window, within which attention is allocated to the most salient item.